Photoshop / Digital Photography Question

[\/\/illy]

I know that this board is stacked with Photoshop and Digital Photography gurus so I'm hoping to get a little guidance here.

When you're preparing a digital photograph for viewing on the web, what steps do you take to reduce it's size? Obviously the actual image size is one, but do you reduce the DPI and if so, what value do you reduce it to? 96 dpi seems to be what Photoshop's 'Save for Web...' feature uses.

Do you use the 'Auto Levels' feature of Photoshop? I've been flipping back and forth between my original levels and the ones selected by the 'Auto Levels' feature and picking the settings that I like best on a picture by picture basis.

Thanks!

[bouche]

72 dpi

optimize to a jpg with about a 60 (medium) for quality.

auto levels and/or contrast usually works fine.

[paisley]

a few years back the best resolution you could get on the web was 72 dpi... not sure if the same level is still true but thats what I base my website images on

- when saving photographs for the web always use .jpg format

- when saving graphics such as cartoons or font titles, buttons, etc. that don't require the same depth use .gif format (which you can adjust the number of colors used as you "save for the web" in Photoshop)

I don't like to use images on a site over 50k as I like to keep any page I design under 90k or so (preferably less than that though, 90k is making an exception for something)

1k to 5k for buttons and other graphics

if you're doing a photography intensive site with large images always use thumbnails so people don't have to wait for all your pics to load (including the ones they're not interested in)

hope that helps a bit

[guigsy]

i usually resize my images to 72 dpi, and however many pixels i want on the long side, typically somewhere between 400 and 600, depending on the image and where it's going, and then i use the save for web feature. i adjust the quality as it suits the image, but i try to never go below 30 quality... even that is getting really low...

personally, i dont use the auto anything... levels, contrast, etc... but, i do use the levels adjustment, and the hue/saturation, and the brightness/contrast... i use those in layer adjustments with masks, so i can make adjustments as each one changes the effect on the other... i've recently gotten into using the curves a little more, too, but im finding them a little trickier... but more fun, in a creative sense.

[secondtube]

no auto for me either...

i will manually change the brightness and contrast.